In an e-mail to me, my girlfriend mentioned that she had gotten “a Latvian scam email,” which I of course read as “Latverian.” Then my brain immediately gave me this:

The magnanimous DOOM is holding an inconceivable amount of your nigh-worthless money in a special account, which he needs to transfer through your soon-to-be-vassal-state’s financial system for reasons with which you need not concern yourself. YOU HAVE BEEN PERSONALLY SELECTED BY DOOM to bear this honor. You shall submit to DOOM all personal information immediately. Upon completion of the transaction, DOOM shall reward you handsomely by calling off the assassination squad currently assigned to you. HAIL DOOM.

HER: My mom always sends me Easter stuff early because she thinks it’s going to take a week to get across the country, but then it shows up the next day. Which I don’t even know how that’s physically possible, but…

ME: Well, with FedEx’s Previous-Day Delivery…

HER: “When you absolutely, positively need to get it there yesterday.”

ME: I like to send things to myself. I can get the coolest stuff for a day!

HER: What do you mean?

ME: Like, let’s say I decide that tomorrow I’m going to send myself a puppy. Then, ta-da, a puppy is on my doorstep today. I never have to actually buy it; all I have to do is make sure I send it back the next day. The puppy just goes through the loop forever.

HER: You know, the puppy would keep ageing.

ME: That’s true. So my memory of it would keep changing to be a day older.

HER: It would?

ME: Right. Every time the puppy goes through the loop, it would change history by being one day older. And, assuming that every day for the puppy corresponds to a day that I live into the future, as the years went by I would keep remembering an older and older dog.

HER: Until about fifteen years from then…

ME: I’d be like, “Why did I send myself a dead dog fifteen years ago?”

I feel a little too underinformed about this question, and I’d like people to explain/answer/correct/confirm me on it. I admit it makes some sweeping generalizations, so if it’s a strawman, let me know where it falls apart, but here it is:

Why for the past eight years has the American conservative (principally Republican) movement been cavalier about the loss of actual freedoms like habeas corpus and the need for warrants, but is suddenly terrified that the partial nationalization of failing banks and/or other industries (even for a weekend) is a ticket to Stalinism?

The best answer I can come up with is pure faith in the people in charge: the “good monarch” philosophy that says that as long as one’s own party has the reins, power won’t be abused. But I’m sure there’s far more to it than that, and if you can enlighten me (especially if you skew conservative), I’d love to hear it.

You may have heard of “Where the Hell Is Matt?“, a serious of videos of this guy named Matt dancing in various locations across the globe. It started as a personal project, but then he got corporate sponsorship and made more extensive, vaguely more professional versions as he globetrotted. Well, the last series he did ended in Seattle, where he lives. And where I live. He put the word out that he was going to be dancing at a certain time and place, and anyone was invited to join him. So my girlfriend and I went, and as our big crowd was bouncing around, she and I grabbed each other’s hands and spun around till we fell over. The moment of falling is where the Seattle clip starts. You can see us in the very upper-right. The most identifiable moment is when I stand up and wave my arms instead of helping her up; I’m wearing a black shirt with white sleeves, and she’s wearing a red jacket. It’s the end clip:

Unfortunately, the video is so small and compressed that you can’t really tell that a third of the crowd is dressed in anime costumes for no reason I was ever able to discern. They’d just been milling around the park, and they watched us set up for a fair while before wandering over and joining us. Did we ruin a perfectly good LARP session? Hopefully.